About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The International Spy Museum (link) in Washington DC (near the Verizon Center
Metro) has a few short films scattered throughout its exhibits that fit the
theme of this blog.

To cut to the chase, the most relevant “film” is the last
one, “Weapons of Mass Disruption”, which is projected on a plasma screen,
giving interviews with energy experts, in a room dedicated to cyberterrorism,
and especially the idea that cyber attacks could bring down most of the US
power grid, even for months.

The dire consequences for people (pretty much as in the NBC
series “Revolution”) are depicted well, but missing is the issue of why
critical controls of the power grid software would even be accessible to the “public’
Internet topology. This issue has been
debated since about 2002.

As noted here, some former conservative politicians (like
New Gingrich) are particularly concerned about possible solar storms (and
coronal mass ejections), or possibly electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks from
terrorists, which could even be localized and don’t necessarily require nuclear
weapons But the museum did not cover
that possibility.

The museum tour introduces the whole spy culture with a
6-minute short film “All Is Not What It Seems”. Later, after the visitor has
seen the historical period exhibits, the visitor can see the “rest” of this
film, comprising about ten testimonials of CIA section chiefs or overseas
agents (or a few times, FBI agents) about how they gathered intelligence,
particularly in counterterrorism efforts (as against Hamas). In one case, a female agent described a “brush
drop” which is almost invisible even to street security cameras.

The introductory segment is followed in another room with a
curious manage of short film clips from the WWII period, including the Disney
Donald Duck cartoon “The New Spirit”, encouraging people to pay their income
taxes early so that the government can buy munitions for the war effort! There
follow some newsreels, one of which shows a 46-year-old J. Edgar Hoover
addressing his FBI agents.

There follow more film segments about the
counter-intelligence (feeding lies) surrounding the D-day invasion and then the
Manhattan Project.

The museum also offers a film retrospect “Exquisitely Evil:
50 Years of the Bond Villains”, from Dr. No (1961) to caricatures of Al Qaeda
today.

The museum presents a pretty conventional idea of “spy work”,
which (in this context) may mean fake identity (even disguises) and arranging
clandestine exchanges of information (one example offered concerns a Boston Red
Sox fantasy baseball game). What happens
in sci-fi scenario where some peril (perhaps a pandemic) presents itself and it
isn’t clear whether it is natural or from an enemy, or both?

(Note: URL direct link name for post has a different spelling ("soy") because of an initial typo, corrected for display only/)

Thursday, July 04, 2013

Netflix has a reasonably recent Comsky interview film by
Will Pascoe, “Noam Chomsky on the World: The Chomsky Sessions” , dated 2008. The film comprises his lectures at McMaster
University in Hamilton. Ontario, and some personal interviews.

I had reviewed the interview film “Power and Terror: Noam
Chomsky in Our Times” from John Junkerman, in 2002, on the Movies Blog. This new interview film seems to have pretty
much the same material, and maybe the same lectures.

Chomsky takes the view that world still runs itself for the
rich, and that moral calls for personal sacrifice often seem to be given out to
benefit the power structure.

He makes a lot of the fact that, even in the world of a
global Internet, there is an effort to make sure that more educated people have
the “right beliefs”.

The DVD contains as a bonus a 70-minute lecture, “Is There
Intelligent Life on Earth?” Chomsky
mentions the historical fact that “one word” from a Russian submarine commander
in October 1962 may have prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from blowing up
into nuclear war. I had covered this
event with a review of the PBS film “The Man Who Save the World” (in the “Secrets of the Dead” series) on the
TV Blog, Oct. 23, 2013.

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